29 September 2012

I'm the smiling face on your TV
I'm the cult of personality
I exploit you, still you love me
I told you one and one make three
I'm the cult of personality
Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi
I'm the cult of personality
Cult of personality

Oil can no longer blind Venezuelans to their leader's failure. The flaws in Chávez's 21st-century socialism are all too clear.

By Francisco Toro, The Guardian

As Venezuelans get ready to head to the polls for the most
closely fought presidential election of the past 14 years, one question
is at the forefront of everyone's mind: does Hugo Chávez still have it?
By "it", I mean his legendary, intense, emotional connection with the
poor – a kind of attachment that has, for many, a feeling of religious
fervour. Of faith.

But
14 years on, as even his most hardcore supporters acknowledge, Chávez's
experiment in 21st-century socialism isn't really working. After the
chaotic nationalisation of most of the agro-industrial chain – from the
farm to the supermarket – food shortages have become chronic, with various staples disappearing from shelves. Lines at subsidised government grocery shops are long, and particularly scarce commodities sell out almost the second they're delivered.

On closer inspection, the only thing that appears to be 21st century about Chávez's 21st-century socialism isthe presidential Twitter account.
The economy is still run along the same rigid lines that crippled
eastern bloc economies for much of the 20th century. One after another,
industries have been nationalised only to become outsized money-pits
unable to produce the goods needed. The steel and cement industries can't produce enough to meet the country's housing needs; electric utilities have brought chronic blackouts throughout the country;
and the phone company has failed to deliver adequate internet access.
Venezuelans like to joke that Julian Assange passed over Venezuela for
political asylum simply because the internet is so slow there.

'There’s a thirst in Venezuela to move beyond the divisive politics of the Hugo Chávez personality cult.'

That
Venezuela's economy doesn't grind to a halt, Zimbabwe style, amid the
waste, corruption and mismanagement of incompetent central planning is
down to a single word: oil. Sitting atopthe world's largest reserves
at a time of extraordinarily high prices, the government is kept afloat
by a torrent of petrodollars that more or less papers over the cracks.
When steel production falls by two-thirds after a botched
nationalisation, the government simply re-routes part of the petrodollar
stream to finance steel imports. When nationalised farms suffer a
similar fate, food imports are jacked up.

Oil wealth is a magical
elixir that keeps up the appearance of normality, even as the country
sinks deeper and deeper into the economic morass.In many ways
that near-mystical bond with the poor is the most important of the
assets that oil funds. Chávez has been careful to keep the spigots open,
channelling a constant stream of populist giveaways to his supporters.
An oil-for-appliances deal with China, for example, has allowed
Venezuela to import more than 3m Chinese-made stoves, refrigerators,
washing machines, air conditioners and flat-screen TVs, goodies handed
out directly to governing party supporters as part of "My Well-Stocked
Home" – a government social programme, whose logo includes the comandante presidente's face.

The guiding principle to Chavista social policy is simple: people must
never be under the impression it's to the welfare state they owe their
access to oil-financed goodies – all gratitude and loyalty must be
focused on Chávez himself. The resulting cult of personality is neatly
captured in that slogan. Chávez, we're told, is no mere politician: he
is the "heart of my fatherland" – with that possessive pronoun to cement
each voter's twin loyalties to the nation and its leader.

It's only the
tiniest step from that formulation to its flip-side: failure to support
the leader istantamount to treason.

It
has taken Venezuela's long-suffering opposition movement 14 years to
decode Chávez's intoxicating appeal and formulate a compelling
alternative. This year the opposition has finally united and rallied
around Henrique Capriles,
an energetic young state governor who has put pragmatism and problem
solving at the centre of his campaign. Capriles can't match Chávez for
charisma, and doesn't try to. But after 14 years of deepening economic
dysfunction, administrative chaos and dependence on oil, he has sensed
an opening for a no-nonsense campaign centred on institutionalising the
revolution's social advances while sweeping away its legacy of political
sectarianism, ideological rigidity and mismanagement. "Never again
should you have to show a Socialist party membership card to access a
social programme," Capriles says in his stump speech, invariably
bringing the house down. The line hits home because every person in the
audience knows someone who has been shut out of access to the latest oil
bonanza for ideological deviance.

Capriles senses there's a
thirst in Venezuela to move beyond the divisive politics of the Chávez
personality cult; that for more and more one-time Chavistas the old
visceral pull of the caudillo's charisma has worn thin in the
face of a mass of unsolved problems; that Venezuelans crave the type of
minimally competent government they've not had for years; and that
they're ready to take a chance on change.

Cult Of Personality - Living Colour

Look in my eyes, what do you see?
Cult of personality
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I've been everything you want to be
I'm the cult of personality
Like Mussolini and Kennedy
I'm the cult of personality
Cult of personality
Cult of personality

Neon lights, Nobel Prize
When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You won't have to follow me
Only you can set me free

I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face on your TV
I'm the cult of personality
I exploit you, still you love me
I told you one and one make three
I'm the cult of personality
Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi
I'm the cult of personality
Cult of personality
Cult of personality

Neon lights, a Nobel Prize
A leader speaks, that leader dies
You won't have to follow me
Only you can set you free

You gave me fortune
You gave me fame
You gave me power in your God's name
I'm every person you need to be
I'm the cult of personality

- Carol Burris, principal of South
Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State
Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New
York State.

Here’s a powerful piece about how an award-winning principal went from being a Common Core supporter
to an opponent. This was written by Carol Burris, principal of South
Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State
Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New
York State.

She is one of the co-authors of the principals’ letter against evaluating teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by 1,535 New York principals.

By Carol Burris

When I first read about the Common Core State Standards,
I cheered. I believe that our schools should teach all students
(except for those who have severe learning disabilities), the skills,
habits and knowledge that they need to be successful in post secondary
education. That doesn’t mean that every teenager must be prepared to
enter Harvard, but it does mean that every young adult, with few
exceptions, should at least be prepared to enter their local community
college. That is how we give students a real choice.

I even co-authored a book, “Opening the Common Core,”
on how to help schools meet that goal. It is a book about rich
curriculum and equitable teaching practices, not about testing and
sanctions. We wrote it because we thought that the Common Core would be a
student-centered reform based on principles of equity.

I confess that I was naïve. I should have known in an age in which
standardized tests direct teaching and learning, that the standards
themselves would quickly become operationalized by tests. Testing,
coupled with the evaluation of teachers by scores, is driving its
implementation. The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted. The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

I hear about those distortions every day. Many of the teachers in my
high school are also the parents of young children. They come into my
office with horror stories regarding the incessant pre-testing, testing
and test prep that is taking place in their own children’s classrooms.
Last month, a colleague gave me a multiple-choice quiz taken by his
seven-year old son during music. Here is a question:

Kings and queens COMMISSIONED Mozart to write symphonies for celebrations and ceremonies. What does COMMISSION mean?

to force someone to do work against his or her will

to divide a piece of music into different movements

to perform a long song accompanied by an orchestra

to pay someone to create artwork or a piece of music

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for
second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the
top. What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7
year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead
taking a vocabulary quiz.

I think that the reason for the quiz is evident to anyone who has
been following the reform debate. The Common Core places an
extraordinary emphasis on vocabulary development. Probably, the music
teacher believes she must do her part in test prep. More than likely she
is being evaluated in part by the English Language Arts test scores of
the building. Teachers are engaged in practices like these because they
are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments are
educationally sound. Their principals are pressured and nervous about
their own scores and the school’s scores. Guaranteed, every child in the
class feels that pressure and trepidation as well.

An English teacher in my building came to me with a ‘reading test’
that her third grader took. Her daughter did poorly on the test. As
both a mother and an English teacher she knew that the difficulty of the
passage and the questions were way over grade level. Her daughter, who
is an excellent reader, was crushed. She and I looked on the side of
the copy of the quiz and found the word “Pearson.” The school,
responding to pressure from New York State, had purchased test prep
materials from the company that makes the exam for the state.

I am troubled that a company that has a multi-million dollar contract
to create tests for the state should also be able to profit from
producing test prep materials. I am even more deeply troubled that this
wonderful little girl, whom I have known since she was born, is being
subject to this distortion of what her primary education should be.

There are so many stories that I could tell–the story of my guidance
counselor’s sixth-grade, learning disabled child who feels like a
failure due to constant testing, a principal of an elementary school who
is furious with having to use to use a book he deems inappropriate for
third graders because his district bought the State Education Department
approved common core curriculum, and the frustration of math teachers
due to the ever-changing rules regarding the use of calculators on the
tests. And all of this is mixed with the toxic fear that comes from
knowing you will be evaluated by test results and that “your score” will
be known to any of your parents who ask.

When state education officials chide, “Don’t drill for the test, it
does not work”, teachers laugh. Of course test prep works. Every parent who has ever paid hundredsof dollars forSAT prepknows
it works —but no parent is foolish enough to think that the average 56
point ‘coaching’ jump in an SAT score means that their child is more
“college ready.”

Test scores are a rough proxy for learning. Tests imperfectly examine selected
domains of skills, so that we can infer what students know. Real
learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections
with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order
to create additional meaning from new information. In short, with tests
we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

What occurs in a “data driven”, high-stakes learning environment is
that the full domain of what should be learned narrows to those items
tested. The Common Core, for example, wants students to grow in five
skill areas in English Language Arts — reading, writing, speaking,
listening and collaboration. But the Common Core tests will only measure
reading and writing. Parents can expect that the other three will be
neglected as teachers frantically try to prepare students for the
difficult and high-stakes tests. What gets measured gets done, and make
no mistake: “reformers” understand that full well. In fact, they count
on it. They see data, not children. For the corporate reformers, test
data constitute the bottom-line profits that they watch.

There is no one more knowledgeable about school change and systemic
reforms than Michael Fullan. He is a renowned international authority
on school reform, having been actively engaged in both its
implementation as well in the analysis of reform results. I had the
pleasure of listening to him this week at the Long Island ASCD spring conference.

Fullan told us that the present reforms are led by the wrong drivers of change — individual accountability of teachers, linked to test scores and
punishment, cannot be successful in transforming schools. He told us
that the Common Core standards will fall of their own weight because
standards and assessments, rather than curriculum and instruction are
driving the Common Core. He explained that the right driver of school
change is capacity building. Data should be used as a strategy for
improvement, not for accountability purposes. The Common Core is a
powerful tool, but it is being implemented using the wrong drivers.

Fullan helped tosuccessfully lead the transformation of schools in Ontario, Canada, and he has tried to
influence our national conversation, but his advice has been shunned. I
will close with a final quote from Fullan and let readers draw their
own conclusions:

Business Execs: Fight for Common Core Before It's Too Late

By Sean Cavanagh

Washington

Representatives of major corporations today urged their peers in the
business community to take up the fight to defend the Common Core State
Standards—and warned them to steel themselves for opposition from some quarters, and apathy from others.

At an education forumheld by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its headquarters, leaders from
Intel Corp., Cisco Systems, and the ExxonMobil Foundation described
their efforts to promote the standards through different strategies,
including coast-to-coast advertising campaigns and outreach to company
employees and parents in the overall community. That salesmanship will
continue over the coming months, they said.

Still, so far it has not been easy.

That was evident in the reaction to a particularly high-profile
effort to sell the common core by ExxonMobil, which has paid for a
series ofnationwide, televised adspromoting the standards.

For every 100 emails the company has received in response to the ads,
a staggering number of them, about 99, were negative, estimated Patrick
McCarthy, the executive director of the ExxonMobil Foundation.

"There's a lot of them that say, 'How could you do this? How could
you support the common core?'" McCarthy told the chamber audience.
"There's just all these myths out there."

Among those myths: that the standards were designed by federal
officials, and that the common core creates a detailed curriculum that
schools will be forced to follow, McCarthy and other speakers on a panel
said.

ExxonMobil is not backing away, he said. The company has plans to
continue to run TV ads promoting the common core, to write op-eds in
newspapers supporting it, and to aggressively lobby state legislators
not to back away from commitments to the standards, he said.

"These policymakers are hearing from tea-party activists, from
anti-common-core activists," McCarthy said. "All they're hearing is why
the common core is bad. ... Policymakers are eager to hear from [the
business community]. They want to hear the other side of the story."

Carlos Contreras, the director of U.S. education for tech giant Intel,
said his company has been discussing the importance of the common core
at forums for its employees, with the idea that those workers will
become ambassadors for the standards.

But those efforts have also offered reminders of the tough road
ahead. Surveys of Intel employees showed that roughly 50 percent of them
were not familiar with the common core. And a small but substantial
portion of those workers appear to be adamantly against them, Contreras
said.

Contreras advised the business leaders in attendance to make sure
their representatives in states and cities are familiar with the
standards, and then ask those community voices to stand up for the
common core.

Cisco Systems is trying to educate its sales force and its business
partners about the common core, said Renee Patton, the director of
education for the company. The goal, she said, is to help them sort
through, "How do they handle objections when they hear them in the
community?"

One of the biggest fears Patton hears does not focus on the standards
themselves, but on the tests aligned to them, and the costs of
implementing online tests scheduled to begin during the 20140-2015
academic year. Concerns about school districts' ability to pull off the
online tests have grown louder in recent months.

Another speaker at the event, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam,
acknowledged that he and other backers of the standards face "a real
battle" in standing up for them.

That fight is likely to play out in public this week, when Tennessee state legislators are expected to hold a hearing
focused on criticism of the standards, he noted. Opposition to the
standards has risen from both the far right and far left, creating a
"fairly unique push from both ends," said the Republican governor, who
supports the common core.

"The way we address it is we keep talking about what it is," Haslam said, "and what it's not."

[UPDATE (Sept. 18): Another major business
organization met this week in Washington with education on the agenda:
the Business Roundtable, a group representing more than 200 CEOs, which
supports the common core.

President Obama spoke to the roundtable on Wednesday, asking them to
back his efforts to reign in college costs and thanking them for getting
behind the standards.

The common core will ensure "that every young person in America has
the opportunity to get prepared for the kinds of jobs that are going to
exist in the 21st century," Obama said, according to a transcript.

Secretary Arne Duncan addressed the roundtable the same day, touching
on the administration's college affordability and early education
efforts, as well as "the importance of our children needing to be held
to high educational standards," spokesman Cameron French said in an
e-mail.]

24 September 2012

“The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher
Stevens and three other Americans has dealt the Central Intelligence
Agency a major setback in its intelligence-gathering efforts at a time
of increasing instability in the North African nation.” One official is
quoted as saying:

“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss. We got our
eyes poked out.”

Never you mind, it's just a "bump in the road..."

STEVE KROFT: “Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the
recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support
for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?”

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “Well, I’d said even at the time that this is going
to be a rocky path. the question presumes that somehow we could have
stopped this wave of change. I think it was absolutely the right thing
for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights — a
notion that — people have — to be able to — participate — in — their own
governance. But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain
that there are going to be bumps in the road because — you know, in a
lot of these places — the one organizing principle — has been Islam."

Another Brick In the Wall - Pink Floyd Daddy's flown across the oceanLeaving just a memorySnapshot in the family albumDaddy what else did you leave for me?Daddy, what'd'ja leave behind for me?!?All in all it was just a brick in the wall.All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.

We don't need no educationWe dont need no thought controlNo dark sarcasm in the classroomTeachers leave them kids aloneHey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!All in all it's just another brick in the wall.All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

We don't need no educationWe dont need no thought controlNo dark sarcasm in the classroomTeachers leave them kids aloneHey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!All in all it's just another brick in the wall.All in all you're just another brick in the wall."Wrong, Do it again!""If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding. How can youhave any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?""You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!"

[Sound of many TV's coming on, all on different channels]"The Bulls are already out there"Pink: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!""This Roman Meal bakery thought you'd like to know."

I don't need no arms around meAnd I dont need no drugs to calm me.I have seen the writing on the wall.Don't think I need anything at all.No! Don't think I'll need anything at all.All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.All in all you were all just bricks in the wall.

If you could see yourself now, baby
It's not my fault
You used to be so in control
You're going to roll right over this one
Just roll me over, let me go
You're laying blame
Take this as no, no, no

"The buck stops with me."

- President Harry S Truman

“As president I bear responsibility for everything, to some degree."

- President Barack H Obama

Bang and Blame - R.E.M.If you could see yourself now, baby
It's not my fault
You used to be so in control
You're going to roll right over this one
Just roll me over, let me go
You're laying blame
Take this as no, no, no

If you could see yourself now baby,
The tables have turned
The whole world hinges on your swings
Your secret life of indiscreet discretions
I'd turn the screw and leave the screen,
Don't point your finger,
You know that's not my thing

You came to bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,
Blame, blame, blame
You bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,
It's not my thing so let it go, now

You've got a little worry,
I know it all too well,
I've got your number,
But so does every kiss-and-tell
Who dares to cross your threshold,
Or happens on your way,
Stop laying blame
You know that's not my thing